Tim Bunce wrote:
You can find my current draft at http://files.me.com/tim.bunce/65oikg (2.3MB
PDF)
I'd be grateful for feedback on any of the slides, but I'm especially
interested in updates for:
First off, the slideshow looks very good in general, and I'll look forward to
using it myself after its done to evangelize Perl.
I have some suggestions:
p 2 - You may want to change the name of the talk as advertised everywhere to
something more positive sounding, though still mention it addresses myths.
Maybe flip the components, to say "Startling Realities & Baseless Myths".
Although the current title is still fine, and its certainly good you have the
Startling Realities part in it, even if second.
pp 22-23 - You might want to update the screen captures related to Moose, both
its search.cpan page and dependency graph, since its moved a long way from 2008;
on the other hand, the existing captures are still quite representative, which
is the point, so maybe nothing to do here.
pg 36 - About the "Perl Best Practices" book, you should be clear to mention
that what is considered best practices has evolved significantly since that book
came out, so teams can't simply agree on "We'll just follow PBP guidelines" and
call it a day, but should study more modern resources also; in particular the
recommendation to use Class::STD/etc is outdated, and people should use Moose
instead.
pg 48 - Typo, "vented speen", it appears.
pg 52 - Still have XXX for count of Perl 5.10.1 core, bundled tests.
pg 56 - Newest Perl versions 5.10.1, 5.8.9 not in graph.
I don't know if you're going for visual consistency between the Perl 5 and
Perl 6 sections, but in the former, the section dealing with each myth ended
with the title of that myth with "busted" superimposed. Now even if you're not
going for the multi-screen transition, you should at least mark the end of each
section with "busted".
pg 73 - I suggest having Rakudo first in the list and Pugs second; Rakudo is
arguably the single most important one in recent history as far as actually
being well supported, used, developed, and is the closest to having an actual
roadmap, and the closest to "official" even though there is no actual "official".
pg 77 - (Shades of the OSCON 2008 version of this talk.) You should remove
any mention of Muldis DB. During the timeline of your talk, it is completely
vaporware and has no significant amount of Perl 6 code, and its weight is almost
entirely POD. Likewise don't mention Set::Relation, which like the other has an
ext/ dir under Pugs. Both of those *will* be rewritten in Perl 6 in the near
future, and be quite large, but for *now* they don't exist and shouldn't be
cited. (But first, I'm still making the Perl 5 versions.)
Generally speaking with your metrics, it is valuable to distinguish of a
project's code lines from its documentation lines (or blank lines). Some
projects, such as mine, are very heavy with POD, which may outweigh the code in
some cases. I think Moose et al are also POD heavy relative to their code.
pg 80 - You already recognized the need to update the graph. And of course,
when you do, you would be sure to mention that any significant dip starting
through 2008 was due to lots of sub-projects splitting off. And the Rakudo
commits graph that shows up 5 slides later shows where some of those went.
Once again great work. And its particularly good that you're backing up what
you say in general with data, so its easier to trust, verify, and convince. And
graphs are easy to absorb / make an impact.
I hope you're going to post another draft between now and the talk, so people
can review it again post changes.
-- Darren Duncan
